While other MediaPost newsletters and articles remain free to all ... our new Research Intelligencer service is reserved for paid subscribers ...

Subscribe today to gain access to every Research Intelligencer article we publish as well as the exclusive daily newsletter, full access to The MediaPost Cases, first-look research and daily insights from Joe Mandese, Editor in Chief.

Verizon Media Launches COVID-19 Search Engine For Research

Verizon Media on Wednesday launched a search engine to help medical professionals and researchers find COVID-19 data without having to build their own search back-end technology.

Company
developers built the open-source search engine using Vespa, Verizon Media’s technology, which
processes tons of data. The company says it uses Vespa for applications such as recommendation, personalization and ad targeting, as well as to stream personalized articles on Yahoo.com.

Verizon Media has used Vespa to index more than 44,000 COVID-19-related articles by keyword, so researchers can easily find the information they need. The search engine is open to anyone.

Developers built the search engine after learning that the White House and the medical community issued a call to action to the world's artificial intelligence experts to develop text and
data-mining tools that can help the medical community develop answers to high-priority scientific questions. The project stems from the COVID-19 Challenge.

advertisement

advertisement

The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset
is known as CORD-19. The CORD-19 dataset, which Verizon Media developers built the search engine on, represents an extensive
machine-readable coronavirus literature collection available for data mining. This gives the worldwide AI research community an opportunity to apply text and data-mining approaches to find answers to
questions within and connect insights across this content in support of the ongoing COVID-19 response efforts worldwide.

Some of the research includes papers on what is known about the transition and incubation period and environmental stability.
What do we know about COVID-19 risk factors?; and What do we know about vaccines and therapeutics? There are many other topics.

The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge project involves
engineers and scientists coming together to provide research and knowledge to help stop the virus.